The colorful wonders of Andrew Wyeth’s artistic environments have inspired a new kind of art, and photographer James Welling has captured the colors of Wyeth for a new exhibit starting Aug. 8 at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford.
“Things Beyond Resemblance: James Welling Photographs” will explore the relationship between true color and its artificial reproduction, and it will run through Nov. 15.
In Andrew Wyeth’s studio. –Emma Lee, WHYY.“It’s a mixture of straight photography and distorted,” Welling said in a NewsWorks preview. “So Wyeth became the pretext to making a body of work. It’s an homage to Wyeth and also exploring things that I’m interested in.”
From Wyeth’s original studio and family home to the nearby Kuerner Farm and as far as his studio in Maine, Welling has captured the essence of the many colors that surrounded and inspired Wyeth.
“He loved the discolorations and mold growth, the water stains,” Welling said of Wyeth in the article. “It’s a schoolhouse – the original green on the ceiling was painted a bright green for the school kids, and it’s changed and discolored. Lots of interesting colors in that room.”
Welling has long been fascinated with Wyeth’s work, mimicking it in his own teenaged paintings.
“From Wyeth, I gained an appreciation of different viewpoints,” he said. “I went to art school and put childish things away. Then in the early 2000s, I started looking at him again. When he died, I decided to make a project about Wyeth. The gradients are an offshoot of that.”
Read more about Welling, Wyeth and the new Brandywine exhibit on NewsWorks here.
